A few nice people commented on my posts on functional tests and suggested a few other alternatives:
- Canoo Webtest. It’s XML-based which makes it go right out my window. Sorry about that. We are a small company where programmers have to do their share of test time. This means that we are not afraid of code, in fact we prefer it.
- Jameleon. I had not seen this one, but looking at the tutorial it seems a lot more complex than the stuff we use now.
- PureTest. This is a very competent scenario recorder/player, and I do like the guys at Minq. But as I stated earlier, recording HTTP will not test your page the way HttpUnit does with JavaScript and all.
I am truly happy with the way we do it now. We have a base testcase
class that provides methods like clickButton(). These methods are
implemented as Strategies by both a remote HTTP implementation and
a local in-process mock implementation.
Writing the tests are really easy. All you have to do is:
#java
public void testLoginWithCorrectNameSucceeds() {
goto("/login)";
setFormText("Name", "foo");
setFormTest("Password", "foo");
clickButtonWithName("Login");
assert
}
After a while you can start pushing common higher level functions such as login to the base class for easier reuse.
Since we use a object oriented web API all test fields with labels are rendered in the same way. This means that we can find the form by the labe which is a good thing, since it eliminates the need for artificial id’s.